The border fence, inherited from the apartheid era, is set a few hundred metres south of the international border, which runs down the centre of the limpopo river. It has three lines of razor wire with an electric fence between, and the voltage can be calibrated from deadly to the uncomfortable electric tingle used for game fencing.

A survey in 2005 by army trackers compared human tracks crossing through the fence to those apprehended by the police. they found that only about 15 percent of undocumented migrants were caught.

“look again at that dot. that’s here. that’s home. that’s us. on it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. the aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. there is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. like it or not, for the moment the earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. to me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

Pale blue dot 2013 detail

detail

Swimming Home 2013

Swimming Home 2013 Hand-woven archival Inkjet prints
69 × 49 cm

‘The Swimmer’ is a short story by American author John Cheever, first published in The New Yorker in 1964. The tale reminds me of a particular mindset and situation that I find familiar to a certain class of white people I knew growing up in the last days of Rhodesia, and then Zimbabwe. Although the narrative is set in North American suburbia, it is an allegory that I think fits especially well into this Southern African context. the story is a blend of realism and surrealism and explores themes of loss, the inevitable passage of time and self-deception, all in a drunken haze.